So, I thought I liked Dragon Quest games, but I don't know anymore. My first experience with the DQ series was Dragon Quest VIII, which was a wonderful game with a great story, voice acting, music, and art style. While the game did have random encounters, the main character learned a spell quite early on that you could cast to prevent them from happening. When the time did come to grind, I felt the game had a really great area to hunt King Metal Slimes to strengthen your party. DQ9 was the second game I played in the series. That game basically had no random encounters. Enemies appeared on the screen. For the most part, you could avoid them if you were careful enough, or they would avoid you if your parties level was high enough. Then I played DQV. Which is old school and does not have any of the things mentioned above. I cant stand it. Maybe I lost my patience, I don't know. I don't think I will ever finish that game. I was about 20 hours into it, then I just asked myself...WTF am I doing? I could be playing something else, more engaging. I fucking hate that game now LOL. Sorry for ranting.

In your opinion which games handle random encounters correctly? More specifically JRPGs. I would say Chrono Trigger and the Mario & Luigi series.

Chrono Trigger doesn't have random encounters.  I'm personally fine with them.

after almost 20 years of random battling... yeah, they get a little annoying. an unfortunate trope that lasted a bit too long.

I don't have a problem with them ever. Sometimes they get annoying replaying a Final Fantasy here and there but it's really not a big deal.

@liako21 said:

I your opinion which games handle random encounters correctly?

- Final Fantasy Tactics is one, but that's because you're not actually doing anything while the encounters come up. They don't 'interrupt' anything.

- I had no problem with the encounter system with Crisis Core, but then again the encounters in that one technically aren't random. (I think?) Plus they could be avoided by hugging the walls. That said I wonder if Crisis Core might be cutting it too close.

- Half-Minute Hero does it well because of the sheer speed at which it happens, but the game is a satire and doesn't really count.

p.s. having visible enemies doesn't fall under the definition of random encounters. Unless maybe the enemies are invisible unless you get close, and you have only a second to react and avoid walking into them. But I don't know whether any game does that.